Midlothian woman finds birth parents through DNA kit

MIDLOTHIAN – A Midlothian woman who was adopted at a young age recently found her birth parents through genetic testing.

Not only that – she also discovered her birth parents had married after she was born.

With that knowledge, she found she had a brother and two sisters whom she now has had the chance to meet.

Adopted as a child, Laura Jean Stephens had always wondered about her ancestry, biological parents and health history.

She used a 23andMe® DNA kit, and it eventually gave her the surprise of a lifetime – a match with her niece, which led to the discovery at the age of 54 of her biological parents and full siblings.

Stephens moved to Midlothian when she was 13-years-old. She has been a teacher at Ovilla Christian School for 27 years.

“I bought a 23andMe® kit around Father’s Day in 2018 because I noticed it was advertised as an online sale,” she begins her story.

“I guess I thought maybe one day I’ll give it a try. My mother had passed away from Alzheimer’s 10 months earlier, but my father was and is still alive at 88-years-old.”

Stephens did nothing with the kit for almost a year, not even opening it.

“I had convinced myself I had a year to use it before it expired and kept feeling like it just wasn’t the right time and that I would get around to it on the next break from school,” she said.

When she was planning her family vacation for early June, Stephens realized the kit was about to expire, so she says “I spit in the tube, dropped it in a hot mailbox in town where it sat for almost 24 hours and didn’t think much about it.

“While on vacation, I’d get updates from 23andMe® about receiving and processing the sample. Then, I received an email stating my results would be back in a couple of weeks. The results came back super early – the day after we returned home from vacation. So, I didn’t have a lot of faith in the whole thing from the beginning. And when the results revealed that I had a granddaughter – which I do not – I knew it was all wrong and that they must have gotten me mixed up with someone else.”

Stephens said even so, she felt like she had to reach out to this girl and tell her she was not her granddaughter and not to believe any of it.

“When I did, she said she knew I wasn’t, but was also connected to her cousin who showed up as my nephew. She asked me if I was a Branon or an Anderson and I told her I didn’t know who I was since I was adopted at four or five days old.”

The girl Stephens contacted ended up being a niece, and she and the nephew started asking questions. From there, Stephens began to make discoveries about her birth parents.

“No one knew anything about me except my birth parents and an aunt,” Stephens explains. “I had known about my adoption at birth for as long as I can remember. My adoptive parents could not have children of their own and my mom had suffered several miscarriages. Their names are Hoyle and Connie Shirley. They adopted a son – my adoptive birth brother – who was two and a half years before me. He died unexpectedly this past summer from a form of cancer he had beaten but had then spread to a lung. He had just turned 56, and he died seven weeks after I discovered my entire birth family.”

With the 23andMe® kit, Stephens eventually found she had other siblings from her birth parents too.

They were all raised in California and all, but ones still live there.

With a huge extended family on the birth family side, Stephens says “It was all God’s doing. I would have never expected this to be my ultimate story. The timing, the miraculous details of names I discovered, the fact that I was born on my birth father’s mother’s birthday as the oldest of 25 to 30 grandchildren, how my birth mother was forced to change her mind about keeping me because her father was suddenly hospitalized with a heart condition.”

While not every adopted child might be looking to discover their birth parents there are many reasons some people do want to know the facts.

For Stephens she concludes “For those seeking out family expect the unexpected. Keep the lines of communication open with all involved. Be ready for possible rejection – that is what always held me back even though I had never felt rejected as a baby. The timing also needs to be right for everyone to handle it. We are all beyond grateful to 23andMe® for helping us put all these beautiful pieces of our lives together and for me to be able to tell everyone that no mistakes were made, and I have had a wonderful life.”